American Preclinical Services (APS) has been awarded AAALAC’s Global 3Rs Award for all of North America (there are two-three other winners for other continents). This AAALAC award recognizes our development of a new testing methodology, the In-vitro Blood Loop Assay, as a replacement for the Canine NonAnticoagulated Venous Implant (NAVI) Model for testing thrombogenicity of medical devices. This is truly a significant acknowledgement from a well-respected external organization that the ongoing efforts of APS in redesigning thrombogenicity testing can have a global impact. The APS blood loop has been designed with an end-goal of significantly enhancing the accuracy and performance of thrombogenicity testing and also substantially reducing the number of research animals used to accomplish these goals. Something that all of us at APS are very proud of. A special thanks to our in-vitro team: Sarah Howard, Matt Cunningham, Abby Beltrame and Tim Schatz and all the RT’s and Study Coordinators who supported the work on this assay over the past 3 years. We are also enthusiastic about continuing the development of new alternative in-vitro assays to further advance the 3R’s for current biocompatibility testing.

From the Award announcement letter:

“On behalf of the Global 3Rs Awards Selection Committee, congratulations and thank you for your significant, innovative contributions to the 3Rs of animal-based research. Your efforts to advance ethical science are highly commendable and we hope will impact research animal care and use practices.”

The award will be presented at the formal AAALAC Luncheon on Wednesday October 18th at the 68th National AALAS meeting in Austin, Tx. APS staff members attending the conference will be on hand to accept the award. The publication containing a detailed description of the assay can be found in the Journal of Medical Devices